Roman and the Unknown Holocaust

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Date:

03/11/2014 - 2:00pm

Location:

W.T. Young Libary

Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):

Dr. Krista Heburg

The Romani Holocaust is regularly referred to as “unknown,” a state of affairs that historians, anthropologists, and journalists have attributed to a Romani “culture of forgetting.” Yet since the war, Romani survivors across Europe have made claims for recognition of their persecution in the Holocaust through testimony in court cases and reparations claims, as well as in Romani forms of expressive culture. Taking the example of Czechoslovak Roma, this talk examines how the history of the Romani Holocaust emerges in the contexts of early postwar trials of collaborators, sung accounts of life in Auschwitz, and Communist and post-communist reparations claims, and challenges the trope of unknownness that has come to frame our understanding of the event.

Krista Hegburg is a Program Officer in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her research focuses on reparations politics and the Romani Holocaust in the Czech Republic. She has taught in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland, where she was also a co-founder of the International Institute for the Study of Culture and Education. Dr. Hegburg earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.

The program is co-sponsored by the Campus Outreach Lecture Program of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, supported by the generosity of the Jerome A. Yavitz Charitable Foundation, Inc, and Arlyn S. and Stephen H. Cypen.